White Sox outfield prospect George Wolkow is only 18 years old, but he's an interesting cat.
He was a seventh-round draft pick last July, a spirited toss at the dart board for a development project viewed as having long odds for ever making the majors, but he also might have the highest ceiling of anyone in the Sox farm system not named Noah Schultz. He's functionally right-handed, with the small exception of the first time he ever picked up a bat, he did as a lefty, and now aspires to be the left-handed thumper Guaranteed Rate Field's dimensions have been calling for, going on decades.
Wolkow just won Carolina League Player of the Week. But since his preseason goal was to break camp with Low-A Kannapolis rather than earn a promotion at the start of June, it's hard to convince him that just being more than two years younger than the average player in his league means he's ahead of schedule. Whether he even believes in the concept of being ahead of schedule is up for debate.
Whose schedule are we discussing after all? He is on the The Wolkow Plan.
"I get that I'm young, youngest guy on our A-ball team, things like that," Wolkow said in a phone call. "I tell our hitting coach, hitting coordinator the same thing: I don't want you guys treating me like I'm 18. I want to be treated like my teammates. For me, it's holding myself to that same standard and not making any excuses about my age. I hope to make my big league debut as young as possible. I don't want to sit around and say, 'Oh I'm young, I have time.'"
Over his last 13 games at Kannapolis, Wolkow is hitting .422/.527/.933 with six home runs, producing many nutty highlights of high fly balls, and beleaguered opposing pitchers. Since the central question of the 6-foot-7-inch outfielder as a prospect is whether his light-tower power will show up in games enough to start talking about everything else, this could constitute success.
But he's also quite proud of the two triples he's legged out over that span. One day, he thinks he'll earn a green light on the basepaths from Cannon Ballers manager Patrick Leyland (one imagines Leyland might run such an idea up the White Sox flagpole first). And oh, how Wolkow misses bounding around center field.
"You get all the room to run around, every ball is yours," said Wolkow wistfully, as he's exclusively played right in Kannapolis. "Right field, it's only mine if it's hit to me or my left. I haven't had many opportunities to throw guys out, which has kind of been a bummer. In Arizona I had a couple of guys I threw out from right field. That's something I love to do; make an impact play on defense, maybe change a game."
Of course, Wolkow is striking out 44.4 percent of the time through 28 games at Kannapolis to temper what might otherwise be irrepressible prospect helium. It's tamped down to 30.9 percent during this 13-game heater, but he was expected to have contact issues at this stage of his career -- a lot of them -- and he's having them. Wolkow is keenly aware of it and it's part of his lukewarm self-review, and maybe a little of why he's reluctant to give himself much credit for Kannapolis' first-half division title.
But this is where Wolkow's unforgivingly high standards for himself collide headlong with his unshakable self-confidence.
"I've been striking out a lot, but I've also been helping our team win ball games. You could say I've been struggling on breaking pitches, but there's been moments when I've been hitting them good as well," said Wolkow, who is enjoying how the series schedule is slowly acquainting him with how teams will attack him. "Being able to play a five-game series against a team that's consistently pitching you, all right you come out in Game 1 and see maybe one fastball throughout the whole game, and the next game you can shift your approach toward that.
"For instance, this week, got a couple hits on Monday and the only fastballs I was seeing were drilling me inside, so I come out on Tuesday and the first fastball I see all day is 95 mph on my hands inside corner, and I pull it for a double because I know that's where they're going to throw it to me. Little moments like that. It's nice to be able to adjust throughout the week."
That sort of gradual maturation of approach is what the White Sox believe will take hold over years in the minors, as Wolkow grows the awareness of his hot and cold zones that were underdeveloped as a draft prospect. The prevailing belief is that the necessary physical tools are present, and Wolkow has been at the organization's hitting lab in Arizona enough to verify it.
"A lot of times when I get big, trying to make contact out front, that's when a lot of the swing and miss comes into play," Wolkow said. "My bat speed -- which is actually kind of cool how they start tracking it now with Statcast and all that. But my bat speed was like, off-the-charts really fast. So when I'm swinging so fast and I'm swinging at pitches out in front, I'm going to swing and miss early. For me, it was start to be a little bit more patient, maybe not swing at 105 percent every time in the box, take a little off that and know that my 90 percent could be someone else's 100 percent."
And then there's the matter of pairing the right swing with the right pitch.
"Being big, being young, there's tools that I have that teams see so they're not going to want to just throw me pitches to hit," Wolkow said. "We call it finding the deer. You've got to earn the deer. Don't swing at the rabbits or swing at the birds. It's a hunting reference. You go out to hunt a deer, you don't shoot at the rabbit, or shoot at the bird, you shoot at the deer. If I go out and swing at a rabbit, a changeup low, or swing at a bird, a fastball high, I'm not going to get the hittable pitch I want."
Chicagoland natives discussing hunting references aside, Wolkow is hitting .277/.376/.584 in Low-A through a little over a month of games, which would give the appearance that he's already one of the better hitters in a league full of older players. His .488 batting average on balls in play makes it harder to conclude that, or even be confident that his surface-level results are occurring on the same planet as ours.
At the same time, a large man swinging "like, off-the-charts really fast" will produce off-the-charts exit velocities. Alongside his decent foot speed, Wolkow might never produce a normal BABIP against Low-A defense.
You would be unsurprised to hear what remedy he has in mind for this statistical quandary.
"There's a lot of time left in the season. I hope I can maybe push my time up there a little bit quicker than maybe people would expect," Wolkow said, very much not denying that he'd like to be in Winston-Salem sooner than later. "But you know, if I'm here for playoffs, then yeah man, of course I'd be excited."
